Yepesnopes, as an old time fan of WFRP, I agree with you. However, my experience through the past year demo-ing WFRP3 online, and more personally among my family has showed me that new players to the RPG genre don't want to play tarnished chars. They want to play heros.
It makes sense after all. When those new players are kids, they obviously want to shine, like all kids do. When they are adult, they want to escape into a fantasy world, and feel like heroes. I guess that's why Pathfinder is so successful.
Because my goal is get new players to come back to my table, I want them to feel heroic during this first session. I don't want them to feel the weight of the Old World. However, if they do come back to the table and once they know the game is fun, then yes it's my job as a GM of WFRP to bring in that grim and perilious feel. I think just playing WFRP will do that. The corruption, the diseases, the insanities, the criticals will quickly muddy any clean character.
That being said, I don't think the chars in Journey to BFP are that clean. The miner only helped in crafting the shield… For all what we know, he may just have provided the ore and assisted the runesmith. He is also a selfish dwarf who seems to care more about the shield than the missing dwarf party. The slayer is a drunk, who let his brother down and the hunter is bitter at the slayer for it. The agent is maybe the only one pretty clean, but he'll have to walk a fine line between telling the thruth and lying during the adventure.
I also added two characters, a sister of Sigmar, very Paladin-like, but who doesn't realize when she goes too far, and an halfling ch(thi)ef who wouldn't hesitate appropriating himself what the dwarves seek.
Finally, my overal design of the Beginner character folio can be reused for any kind of Beginner character. The latest version I showcased has changed, and I now have my final design. While I created all the chars from Journey and A Day Late, I won't be able to share them until I visit my family. Uploading those heavy PDFs would be a strain on my 3G connection.
Cheers
Ceodryn

